by Amy Braun
I finally made it to the street, my boots splashing into a puddle and sending a burst of water over my calves. The rainy season in Westraven was merciless, lasting for days, even weeks at a time. I had to get off the streets before the water made running impossible.
I sprinted forward, thunder barking over my head. The pitch black clouds seemed to create shadows over the city. If it weren’t for the lightning and reflective white paint on the crumbling buildings of the market district, I wouldn’t have been able to see at all.
Just as I reached the city streets, a sharp crack of thunder echoed behind me. I jumped and noticed dust spurting out from the wall on my left. Realizing that thunder hadn’t come from the sky at all, I threw another glance over my shoulder.
The marauder had made it outside of the apartment and was hot on my heels. A flintlock pistol was raised and pointed at my back. I couldn’t see his face clearly in the dark night rain, but I imagined his expression was one of pure rage. Now that he was chasing me, I recalled how bulky he was. Over his head, I noticed something moving quickly under the Behemoth. My heart skipped a beat.
No, I thought. No, no!
Lightning flared through the sky and illuminated the two Hellion raiding skiffs emerging from the bottom of the massive warship. Though I couldn’t see the details from where I stood, I knew exactly what they looked like. Scorched metal boats with spear-like masts and ink black sails. Sterns that spilled smoke like blood from a wound. Conical figureheads used to stab unlucky victims and carry them to a hell I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
Both skiffs turned in our direction, as if that split second of light from the earlier pistol shot was all they needed to see where their prey was.
The marauder didn’t notice the real threat sailing behind him, and he wouldn’t hear my warning over the storm. He wouldn’t listen to me at all after I stole from him. I had was to get away from both of them.
I whirled around and pumped my legs as fast as I could, fighting the burning pains shooting through them. I squinted to see through the sheets of rain to figure out where I was. I knew downtown Westraven like the back of my hand, but that didn’t mean much when I couldn’t see a damn thing.
Hide, my survival instinct shouted at me. I have to hide.
I spun around another corner and scanning the shops and collapsed buildings for a place to conceal––
A gust of wind shifted the hair on the right side of my face. I could almost feel the bullet cutting through the dark brown strands. My heart skidded through my chest and I halted involuntarily, hysteria overtaking reason.
Move move move, I screamed at myself.
I did, but I wasn’t fast enough.
A heavy weight slammed into my back and pitched me forward. I landed hard on my chest, the wind crushed from my lungs and my chin scraping along wet, unforgiving gravel. A hand fisted my hair and pulled, straining my neck painfully. I growled and threw my elbow back, catching a body in the ribs. He grunted and I hit him again. The second strike was harder, enough to get him off me. Soon as I felt him stumble, I pushed forward and rolled violently. The spin propelled my legs, and the heel of my boot caught my attacker’s chin with a brutal crack.
He cursed in pain while I got to my feet and snapped another kick to his head. I lunged forward and grabbed the pistol, stealing his chance to shoot me in the back.
Lightning ripped apart the sky again. Thunder exploded in the air and rattled me to the bone. I looked up, fear knotting in my chest when I saw the Hellion skiffs lower to the ground just fifty feet away.
During the day, the Hellions were dressed head-to-toe in a black military jumpsuits and a concealing black helmets with bulbous eyes. Covering the mouthpiece was thick, pointed needle. They were sick mockeries of the once famous Sky Guard military uniforms. But at night, they were natural hunters at their prime. They didn’t need disguises or needle-point masks. Not when they had razor claws and sharp fangs to rend flesh from bone.
Four Hellions leaped from the skiffs even before they landed. They sprinted in my direction, and I panicked. My gut reaction was to run. Save myself, the way I had so many times before. But the man on the ground, the one I’d kicked and stolen from––twice––was lying there, half unconscious. Did he hear the howls of the monsters closing in on him? Did he have any idea how easy he would be to kill?
Was there anything I could do?
No, my gut told me. You know there isn’t, Gemma. You can’t do anything. It’s too late.
But… I had to try, didn’t I?
My warring morals and survival instinct cost him. The Hellions didn’t stop to think about the pain the man was in. They didn’t care that I wanted to do something right, to help him even when I knew he wanted to kill me.
They just saw food, and their bellies were never full.
I raised the pistol I’d stolen and pointed it at one of the Hellions. I squeezed the trigger––
Click.
There were no bullets inside. That was why he’d tackled me.
The Hellions screeched and closed in, just twenty feet from the marauder. I couldn’t save him.
He groaned and my eyes burned. Breath caught in my throat as I turned and ran.
My mind’s eye filled in the details. Hooked claws digging into his body and burying deep into his flesh. Fanged mouths lunging down and biting into exposed skin to drink the hot blood beneath. Even with the thunder, I heard the marauder’s agonized screams as though he were standing right beside me. The sound pushed me harder, driving me through the market district.
The screams of the Hellions spiked fear into my heart. I weaved around another corner, my shoulder skidding along the harsh concrete of a half collapsed building. As I spun, I spotted two Hellions ripping into the fallen marauder, and another two coming after on me. I had to get out of sight, now.
I raced deeper into the downtown district to the judicial offices. I couldn’t tell one landmark from the other thanks to the unyielding rain, but instinct drove me until I reached Regency Square.
I banked a hard left, racing for the decrepit library that sat beside the Westraven Trade Board Office and the Provincial Court of Westraven. My trusty escape route.
I chanced another look over my shoulder. The Hellions were still pursuing me, but I had outrun them for now. I had to trust that the rain would continue to hinder their vision for a little while longer, and that they wouldn’t be able to hear my feet sloshing through the ankle-deep water over their own stomps.
Reaching the library, I discarded the pistol, grabbed the door and shouldered my way in. Pain radiated up my arm, but adrenaline quickly concealed it. I turned and slammed the door shut, threw the lock, and backed up. I flicked my gaze back and forth, up and down, looking for another place to hide. There were dozens of collapsed and shattered bookshelves lying on the ground, surrounded by hardcovers stripped of their pages. Overturned tables and chairs were missing their legs, probably taken by survivors for rebuilding. Rain spat through the broken windows on the second level as wind howled into the building––
Thud!
I jumped as something slammed into the wooden door. So much for confusion.
Thud! Thud!
Both Hellions were throwing their weight onto the door now. I searched the library frantically.
One of the shelves had fallen against the ledge of the second balcony. I spotted an open window past it.
My exit.
Thud! Thud! Crack!
The Hellions were turning the door to splinters.
I bolted for the fallen shelf, leaped onto the top, and scrambled up the weakened wood.
Thud! Crack! Crack!
My fingers slipped on the shelf’s siding. Heavy splinters from the door fell onto the marble floor. Rain slicked the wood of the shelf. I slipped and banged my knee on the hard surface. Hellions shrieked and screamed as the door crunched and bent. The balcony was just in reach––
The front door shattered at the same moment my palms gripped the
cracked marble banister. I hauled myself up and flipped onto the second landing. I ducked low and scooted away from the balcony toward a wide, broken picture window. Below me, the Hellions screamed their outrage. I couldn’t see them, and I wasn’t going to risk looking down and letting the monsters scouring the library see me. If they had my scent, they weren’t going to stop until they found me.
Having hid in here so many times, I knew there was a ladder outside the window that I could climb down. Survivors used it all the time when they wanted to raid the library for building wood or burning supplies. Holding my breath, I slithered up the wall and swung out of the broken window, back into the storm.
Rain pounded onto me again, the cold pelts of water lashing my drenched clothes and shivering skin. The bars of the metal ladder were freezing, each one biting my palms as I scurried down. I reached the street again and looked up. If the Hellions knew I’d escaped them again, I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t going to wait and see, either. I’d already wasted enough time tonight. All I wanted to do was go home, see if I had any warm clothes, and relax with my employer’s prize.
As I turned and started walking toward the hotel, I reached into the large pocket of my coat and took out the tattered black box containing the item I’d stolen. Inside was an electron-cell, a large battery with positive and negative terminals sticking out from the sides. It wasn’t powered and was safe to hold in the rain, and while it was a dented old model that wouldn’t do much to power anything large, it would be able to fuel something like a small heater or a small set of lights.
I pocketed the electron-cell and chanced another glance to the sky, where the Behemoth lingered.
The marauder’s face shot into my mind, and his screams echoed like ghosts in my ears. Guilt stabbed into me. If the pistol hadn’t been empty, would I have been able to save him? Would he have let me? I should have at least warned him.
Reason overrode my regret.
He wouldn’t have listened to you. He’d have attacked you. Brutalized you. Fletcher would be furious if you failed the job. You protected yourself. Dead men don’t need power.
I was good at lying to people. I was even better at lying to myself.
Chapter 2
After The Storm hit, Spruce Tailor shop was my first choice for hiding. I’d been poor before the Hellions began ravaging Westraven and Aon, the country beyond, so I knew the streets. I robbed men and women blind until I was fifteen, long after my father had been murdered in a street brawl and my mother went missing. Spruce was central to everything I needed––restaurants, mechanic shops, main streets, manhole covers if I needed to escape from the surface all together.
The two story brown brick building boasted a forest green roof and matching door, a pleasant, defiant contrast against the blinding white that most of Westraven’s buildings used to have. The shop sold suits and dresses, most of which I used as spare clothes when I couldn’t wash mine. Some of the thicker material could be used for blankets when winter hit.
The upper floors once belonged to the shop owner and his wife, who was the seamstress for the store. Thinking about George and Allison always put a twinge of pain in my heart. When I was an orphaned street rat, they were kind to me. Offering me small coins or extra food, so I never stole from or for them.
The memory of dragging their lifeless bodies out of the shop when the Hellions killed them always cut straight into my heart.
Still, I couldn’t turn away from Spruce. Not when it had dozens of curtains and blankets to hide behind, a warm bed, easy access to the roof, and was relatively intact. It was a place where I could feel safe.
Or, that was what I thought before I noticed the front door to the shop was open. I paused at the front entrance and frowned.
I never left the door open like this. Spruce was mine, and if the door was open, then thieves, survivors, or marauders had welcomed themselves in.
Or my employer, the last man I wanted to see right now.
Not knowing who––or what––was in my home meant I couldn’t waltz through the front door. I glanced at the two caved in apartments on either side of Spruce. Their top halves had been cleaved off in a diagonal slash, the edges of the windows permanently blackened from old fires. There were a few survivors living in those buildings, but we never crossed paths. They knew who I worked for, and avoided me at all costs.
Trudging through the water that was nearly up to my shins, I vowed to beat the stuffing out of whoever invaded my home. I was tired, sore, soaked, cold, starving, and now I could add cranky to the list. The last thing I wanted to do was get into a fight with some selfish bastard who didn’t know what a closed door meant.
Then again, maybe that was exactly what I needed to clear my mood.
I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite.
I walked to the apartment building on the right and shoved open the door. Water sloshed around my ankles and swept into the lobby. I sighed, dreading the mess I would find when I kicked the intruder out of my house. So much for dry clothes and makeshift blankets.
The lobby was pitch black, the sloshing water around my ankles booming the only sound. I dragged myself onto the stairs, but the trek was exhausting with all the water weighing on my clothes like lead. The railing had been torn out of the wall at some point, so I used my hands to paw at the wall and made my way up to the third level.
I left the corridor and finally stood in the hallway, panting to catch my breath. Rain water drizzled from my clothes on to a floor that smelled like moldy carpet. Dim beams of stormy light came from the open or broken doors on either side of the hall. I started to the left, glancing at them as I passed.
Planks and boards were nailed to the walls inside the apartments, a hastily built defense in case Hellions ever chose to raid the buildings. They liked to watch their prey from the Behemoth, able to see them with clarity before they began their hunt, but they weren’t opposed to random scavenging.
I fought back a shiver when I thought about the Hellions who hunted me tonight, the ones who killed the marauder. I assured myself that I was safe. Even if the Hellions figured out I wasn’t in the library, the raging storm was too strong for them to sense and track me. I hadn’t seen any other skiffs descend, so for now, I was safe. I wouldn’t stay that way for long, but what was life without some danger and adventure?
A safe one.
Stomping on the mushy carpet to ignore that naive voice, I made my way to the window at the far end of the hall. No survivors came out to see who was barging through their territory. I grabbed the bottom of the window and thrust it up, the icy wind and slashing rain greeting me again. I scowled back and slipped outside. Still nothing from the apartments behind me. The people who lived here were smart.
Crouching on the ledge of the window, I reached down and grabbed the grappling hook I’d nailed beneath it. None of the apartment’s residents knew it was here since none of them ever used this exit. It was too close to me, and my associates.
Roughly jerking the rope to make sure it was secure, I hauled it up until I had the grappling hook in hand. I knelt on one knee and glanced at the apartment ten feet away. A patch of the green roof was stripped off, and would lead me into the main hallway. It might give me a clue about who was in my house. I twirled the grappling hook in my hand, then glanced at the sky.
The Behemoth sat immobile in the clouds. I cringed when lighting crashed behind it, reminding me too much of the tempest that came with The Storm and the Hellion’s invasion. Clouds like smoke, lightning like daggers, and thunder like a god’s scream ripped open the sky, bringing the Hellions with it.